Vast Spaces

Earlier in the week I woke up before the sun to send two friends off at Logan airport. On the solo drive home it occurred to me, as it has so many times before, that loneliness, though saddening or irritating at times, begs you to know yourself. I hold it dear.

It looked like dusk as the sun rose in an overcast sky. NPR news was quiet on the radio. At first everything I passed gave the impression of turning inward - the run-down commercial lots unopened at that hour of the morning, the streetlights shutting off - but I realized that that was just how I felt. It's the middle of my 24th New England winter, a season when introspection comes naturally. But knowing what comes next, I also feel optimistic.

Soon the pavement will be washed of salt and turn black again, with a few more potholes to show for its trials. Soon the harbor down the street from my house will fill with boats, and people will shed their knitted goods like reptiles shed dead skin. Last night I dreamed I was planting seedlings in a garden. Spring is already happening in my mind, though it is still a couple months away.

I felt it viscerally on the drive home: isolation, exhaustion, and hope. A poignant emotional sensation seemingly spawned from thin air.

To get back to my point about loneliness: the frustrating thing about being human, and a writer especially, is that no matter how many words I use I'll never be able to convey the whole truth of that morning drive home. You will still only have a snapshot of my experience, because you can't possibly know all the things that led up to it. A whole lifetime has gone into crafting this complex filter of associations, where each new stimulus inspires a recollection of things already felt. We are fundamentally alone in the way we experience the world. No one else can see through our eyes.

In the novel Gilead by Marilyn Robinson, the protagonist (an old preacher in rural Iowa) expresses this sentiment very eloquently:

"In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us."

I think learning to value our inherent solitude is essential, because if the self is the only person we can ever really know - and even that is a huge task - then we must learn to pay close attention to the weather inside. I try to find time every day to be alone, to poke amongst the ruins of my private civilization and see how they serve as a springboard for the way I carry myself in the world.

More on this theme next time...